Arkadium Co-Founders: We Knew We Had Made It When We Got Sued

Jessica Rovello and Kenny Rosenblatt were out on a date when they started talking about the arcades of their childhood.Then, the classic gamer argument broke out: who’s better?

It was 2001—long before social games exploded on to Facebook. When they went home, they couldn’t find a place online to play Ms. Pac-Man against each other to settle the score.

Seven months later, Arkadium was born.

Now, Arkadium boasts a stable of more than 300 online casual games, Facebook games and mobile games. It hauled in around $8 million in revenue in 2010, according to Inc., and employs more than 140 people globally.

Rovello and Rosenblatt, now married, were working at a dot-com when they decided to make the big move into the entrepreneurial world.

“All my senior people got huge bonuses and I got like 300 bucks, so that kind of awakened the entrepreneurial spirit in me,” says Rovello, who assumed the role of president at Arkadium. “Being young and maybe having a little bit of hubris, we were just kind of like, we could probably do a better job building a company.”

At the beginning, it was just the two of them running the whole show. Everything was bootstrapped, and about three months in, they recruited their first employee—a friend and former colleague—to come in and be a creative director.

They weren’t choosy back then, and hired their first few employees because they “seemed smart” and were willing to work for free.

“If you desperately need a programmer and the programmer’s sitting in front of you, it’s hard to restrain yourself,” explains Rovello. “For the first couple years, I don’t think we really knew what we were doing in terms of methodology. We went off our gut a lot, and got lucky.”

Rovello and Rosenblatt were also lucky that they had a mentor to help them in the early days. Strauss Zelnick, founder of Zelnick Media and now the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, was there to help, and it made a huge difference as Arkadium began to scale up.

After a year of working out of their apartments, Zelnick gave the couple an office to use—a classy, 5th Avenue space. They stayed there for about a year until getting a real office, even though the business was struggling. It was in the lobby of the building that they lived in.

The next move to a bigger office tripled the rent that they were previously paying, but then came the leap of faith. Arkadium was bursting at the seams and needed a larger office yet again, so Rovello and Rosenblatt searched for location. Zelnick had told them to double whatever amount of office space they thought they needed.

“Lets take the extra floor and pray to God that we do well enough that we can expand into it,” says Rovello. “It sucked. It always sucks. Moving sucks.”

But if you plan well, you won’t have too much downtime, says Rovello. Arkadium always had its two essentials because it stayed organised.

“All that mattered was that we had temporary seating for everybody and we had a solid internet connection,” says Rovello. “And then everything else kind of flowed from there.”

In that process of growth, there’s always a point where an entrepreneur realises that they’ve hit the big-time. For Rovello, it happened when one of Arkadium’s games used a name that was trademarked without realising it. After negotiations, they managed to come to a settlement.

“I think we were always warned that you’re not truly successful until somebody sues you,” says Rovello. “When you’re a startup you kind of feel like you’re untouchable because you’re too small and nobody’s even noticing that you exist. Then, you realise, I’m playing with the big boys now aren’t I?”